The SaaS Podcast - Real Lessons on Growing Profitable SaaS

Baskar Agneeswaran spent two years building a price comparison app that failed. His team's core strength was mobile development, not backend data infrastructure. When they aligned their skills to the Shopify SaaS marketplace - building mobile apps for e-commerce stores - traction came quickly. Launching a marketplace app on Shopify changed everything. Baskar reveals how Vajro priced at $25/month i...

Qwilr's freemium SaaS experiment looked perfect on paper - virality went up, signups surged, and the pipeline was full. Then the numbers told a different story: activation dropped 50%, the sales cycle ballooned from 14 to 60 days, and revenue growth fell from tripling to just 80% year over year. Free users mostly attracted more free users. Mark Tanner breaks down exactly what went wrong with their...

Abdullah Alsaadi failed at four different startups over four years - a crypto app with no market, a Salesforce tool blocked for 18 months, a delivery company that could not scale, and a delivery management SaaS with impossible integrations. Then he pre-sold 5-year subscriptions to four restaurants before writing a line of code, and used that money to build Taker. Abdullah shares how he got his fir...

Arvid Kahl spent 5 hours a day on a train commute reading books and listening to podcasts about building SaaS businesses. Every previous idea had failed. Then he and his partner Danielle built FeedbackPanda - a simple tool for online English teachers - and completed selling a SaaS business for seven figures in just 2 years. But the path to that SaaS exit nearly destroyed Arvid's mental health. He...

Jeroen Corthout built a CRM extension that nobody wanted to buy. Prospects could not see the value of adding another tool alongside their existing CRM. Then he noticed something unexpected - smaller companies were using his product as a full CRM replacement, not an extension. That insight became the niche SaaS positioning that grew Salesflare to over 2,000 paying companies. Jeroen shares how he sp...

Jacob Eiting posted his new SDK on Reddit and got destroyed. People called him a rip-off middleman. His beta launch attracted just 5 signups. He had no revenue and was living off his wife's income. Getting startup traction seemed impossible. So he started writing. He spent 6-12 hours a week publishing content that answered the questions mobile developers were already searching for. Slowly, SEO tra...

Alex Theuma had no background in events and no great business idea. He just started writing about SaaS. A blog turned into a podcast, which turned into meetups, which turned into a B2B community building success that drew 700 people to Dublin in its first year. By 2020, SaaStock was running SaaS community events across five continents with 4,000 attendees. Then the pandemic wiped out his revenue o...

Three college grads in India spent $150 on Google Ads and got zero leads. So they tried something different - they turned their help docs into blog posts, distributed them through forums and co-marketing deals, and built a SaaS content marketing engine that took Trackier from zero to $2M ARR. Udit Verma reveals how Trackier bootstrapped to 350 customers without spending a dollar on paid advertisin...

Romain Dardour spent four years trying to make his first product work. By 2016, Hull was a month away from shutting down. Then a lunch meeting with a growth marketer friend changed everything. The friend did not care about the product but loved how Hull collected and segmented data. That was the moment Romain started finding product-market fit. In five days, Romain and his co-founders built a prot...

Rachel Liaw discovered that roughly half of Fuse Inventory's revenue was coming from the wrong customers. They consumed disproportionate support, requested the wrong features, and were never going to succeed with the product. So she made the painful decision to let those contracts expire - and it transformed the business. Average contract values grew from $1,000 to $3,000-$5,000 per month. Rachel...

April Dunford almost killed a product that would eventually generate over $1 billion in revenue. Her team thought it was desktop productivity software, but the six customers who loved it were using it as an embeddable database for mobile devices. That competitive differentiation only emerged through SaaS positioning work that forced them to talk to every single customer. April shares her five-comp...

Wes Bush watched Vidyard's freemium SaaS product hit 100,000 users and realized that product-led growth was a fundamentally different engine than sales-led. The product was not just something you sell - it was the growth engine itself. That insight led Wes to develop frameworks that help SaaS founders decide on free trial conversion strategy. Why listen: Learn the MOAT framework for deciding betwe...

Paul Joyce spent four years testing a dozen startup ideas. Every single one failed. Then he built Geckoboard, a SaaS metrics dashboard, launched on Hacker News, and got 800 signups but zero paying customers. He quit his day job anyway with five months of runway. Today Geckoboard does over $5M ARR. Why listen: Learn key SaaS growth lessons from 12 failures, how SaaS metrics education became Geckobo...

Luke Thomas sat on a business idea for three years before writing a single line of code. His first customer paid $45 a month. He spent the next three years building early traction to $10K MRR using SaaS SEO strategy and scrappy content marketing SaaS tactics - all while keeping a full-time job. Why listen: Learn how a SaaS SEO strategy of 30-40 long-form blog posts drove organic growth, how leavin...

Matt Barnett recorded personal videos for leads on his morning ferry across Sydney Harbor. The sound quality was terrible - but prospects loved it anyway. That scrappy startup traction experiment became Bonjoro, a customer acquisition startup now with 40,000 users built on viral growth and organic traction. Why listen: Learn how building virality directly into the product created a startup tractio...

Three first-time entrepreneurs bootstrapped an enterprise RFP platform for four years before raising a dime. Finding their first SaaS customers through founder-led sales meant Jafar Owainati was doing seven to nine demos a day linked directly to his personal Calendly calendar. Why listen: Learn how founder-led sales through beta interviews and startup sales tactics grew Loopio from a product colle...

Ryan Carson spent seven years running in-person coding workshops and building the ThinkVitamin blog. When his wife suggested teaching online, that SaaS content marketing foundation launched a bootstrap to profitability journey that turned into tens of millions in revenue with 650,000 students. Why listen: Learn how SaaS content marketing over seven years became the launch platform for an 8-figure...

Sandi Lin left Amazon in 2013 with one year of savings and an idea for a Yelp for online learning. Three months later, she shut it down. Her journey of finding product-market fit through a SaaS pivot was just getting started. Two pivots and a 60-day MVP later, Skilljar found its real opportunity. Why listen: Learn how finding product-market fit required killing a first idea fast, how a randomized...

Most SaaS companies are wasting money on SaaS PPC. Todd Chambers has spent over 10 years running paid media campaigns for SaaS businesses, and he says 95% of them make the same six SaaS lead generation mistakes with their ad spend. Why listen: Learn the six most common SaaS lead generation mistakes - from failing to understand unit economics and not tracking offline conversions, to under-investing...

Darren Chait built a mobile app for meeting preparation. It got thousands of users but monetization was painfully slow. Then his team built an internal Slack plugin - and a customer saw it and asked to use it. That pivot unlocked self-serve SaaS growth through product-led growth that changed everything. Why listen: Learn how Hugo's self-serve SaaS model turns every shared meeting note into a distr...

Robin van Lieshout's SaaS sales funnel was broken. He had 40 customers but most were barely using the product. His BDRs could not book a single meeting with B2B SaaS companies. Then he realized the problem was not product-market fit - it was the sales messaging in his SaaS sales strategy. Why listen: Learn why Robin cut six customer segments generating 70% of revenue, how rewriting the sales deck...

Sabba Keynejad flew to San Francisco for his Y Combinator interview. He got rejected. The reason: "Why are you not charging your users?" Forty-eight hours later, Sabba had 20 paying customers and VEED.io was on the path to SaaS monetization and bootstrap to profitability. Why listen: Learn why doubling SaaS pricing twice with less than one month of runway had zero impact on user growth, how SEO la...

Jaleh Rezaei pitched her first customers with no product demo - just an API and a slide deck. Her first customer paid $100 a month. Two weeks into Y Combinator, Mutiny had its MVP live and was closing SaaS customer acquisition deals by embedding directly into customer teams. Why listen: Learn how doing unscalable things was the fastest path to SaaS customer acquisition and product-market fit, how...

Sam Dolbel's co-founder taught himself to code inside a tent in Tanzania. That scrappy beginning turned into SINC, a workforce management app that grew to 1,000 paying customers through SaaS customer discovery and organic word of mouth - with zero outbound sales. Why listen: Learn the hard lessons of SaaS customer discovery through a free product, why feedback from non-paying users nearly led them...

Ben Tossell generated over $240,000 in revenue in less than a year - as a non-technical founder who never wrote a single line of code. He built Makerpad entirely with no-code SaaS tools like Webflow, Airtable, and Zapier. And for most of that time, it was just a side project while he worked at Earnest Capital. Why listen: Learn how a non-technical founder used Twitter demos and GIFs as a bootstrap...